


Desideratum

by superkawaiifreak



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Convenience Store, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, College, Existentialism, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 07:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6974449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superkawaiifreak/pseuds/superkawaiifreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Axel and Roxas fall in love over 99 cent gum packs, in spite of their odds of working out. Riku and Sora show us what could have been - and what not to be. A PhD candidate, Roxas sifts through his life, and realizes it's in the dirges it that life exists. Our cup of joy is as deep as it is for sorrow.</p><p>Modern AU; Death; Akuroku, Soriku; Dark themes</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desideratum

**Author's Note:**

> Justification(s): Existential monogamy. Because this opens up a realm I’ve never traversed. If you look closely you’ll see the hoi polloi attempting Modernism. I don’t really know what I’m doing with this—I’m just going for it. I opened a document and wrote the introductory scene; the idea is alive by its own animation. It’s about intimacy. It’s about losing. Because what do you do when you lose your home, creature? (Pretentious lack of chronology.)
> 
> AN: Effeminate people; Beckett; Eliot; Crane; Lauridsen; Faulkner; Defoe; Hemingway

 

_Desideratum_

* * *

 

 

Against the credit card’s airy chink, he swiped his plastic card through the—what was it?—pseudo-advanced keypad _._ He knocked over the 32-oz Styrofoam cup.

Roxas frowned. “Something the matter?”

It was Axel’s turn to frown, let the tile pull at his cheeks. “Sorry, I can clean that up.” Axel’s curtain-like ruby hair swished side-to-side, as if blown by the wind.

“No, no,” he absent-mindedly threw his hands up. “I’m sorry--here, let me help you.” The small ice squares were chilly against his fingers as he scooped the cubes back into his cup. “You sure nothing’s up?”

 _Semicolon, time for you and time for me. You think you can have three-point-oh and still have me pay tuition? You live at the end of the world. To put it short, I was afraid._ Achy tinfoil smarted Axel’s mouth. (Or was it gold?) “A lot of things are _up._ ”

“So you’re mocking me now. Good, good--at least we’re getting somewhere.” He flicked some water at his.

“A lot of things are fucked up.”

He glanced at his. “You think?”

“Obviously,” he breathed, “people beheading othis people over a loaf of bread. People creating _actually_ toxic food, and the other people don’t know it’s bad for them. Some asshole came in and accused me of spitting in his coffee earlier. Such a prick,” his eyes sweep across the store; he wants to devastate. “Should have…”

Roxas rubs his hand on his dark-washed jeans, perhaps nervously. He tries a consolatory smile. “People _have_ fucked a lot of things up.”

“—yeah, and America is at the mall.” he angrily pads the counter.

He scans his with saucers for eyes. Like a puppy, he thinks. “What do you mean?”

“What do _you_ mean?”

“Axel--I mean, come on.”

The lovechild of revolutionaries, he rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Whatever. What I mean to say is, well, that _every_ one’s there, shopping, _guzzling_ down their juice blends, and going their way, and falling asleep to the dimming lights of Netflix.”

Roxas turns and sloshes his hand through the cubed ice, a rudder. He vaguely recalls a dream where he traveled to Hell with two demon-hunting sisters and sliced Lucifer’s hand with a _katana_. His eyes snap up. “Let’s go.”

“Go?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Where?”

Roxas scoffs. “You actually want to get out of somewhere. Trapped, yeah? So I’m giving you a way out.” He burns into his eyes. “Let’s go.”

He recoils. “I can’t go.”

“Because?”

“Simple - because I can’t.”

“Well now, that’s just circular reasoning.” Roxas chuckles. Axel rolls his eyes.

His fingers dance along the frozen cubes’ edges. “If you really wanna know—I’m waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Um,” he lances a hulking stare to the red-shirted man across the aisles— _good color_ —who lazily ambles through the five-foot shelves while breathing heavily, rubbing his gaze up and down his unbuttoned eggshell-colored shirt, already claiming that olive body as his in the towering curio cabinets he has at home, numbly placed by his French doors that overlook the sunny vista that is Palm Springs. He gestures toward him. “Waiting for this rat to leave.”

Fine and definite, Roxas nonchalantly glances at the man. “Fine. You’re saying that after he leaves, you can go?” He catches his in the threads of his fabrications.

“Not until the Twinkies are gone,” he winks and zeroes in on Roxas’s lips. Hot light bounces off the rat’s shiny-headed skin. Needle-sized hair follicles. Jaundiced skin. Axel wipes his brow, damning the still-hot darkened desert in two words: “Too hot.” He slicks the sweat from his forehead.

“It is.” Blue clouds on black clouds and the sky retreats. “It’s dusk, now,” Roxas rubs his thumb with his. “It’s been almost a year. Can we go?” His voice echoed of the longing he wishes to share with his.

Straw-like ivory hands dabbled on golden-plated palms, shielding the green fruit’s underbelly, as they should. “I’m waiting.” he looked down.

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting for God, or something like that.”

Roxas rolls his eyes. “You’re waiting for him. That— _that—_ rat?” A raised hand, a finger to the moon. “It looks like he’s almost done,” the man scurries past the Skittles while swiping at the sticky buns. “Hey—you, are you done yet? Can you get the fuck out of here?”

Nonplussed, Rat-Face scuttles across the ceramic tiles. His exposed pink skin looked like a bare, naked ass. Hairy and gray, his tongue hangs over his bottom lip, like some premature jowl on his face oozing from the cavities of his cavernous, gooselike throat.

He, the rotting creature, tossed the plastic-wrapped cake on the counter.

“Well--then take it.” That silvery rat spoke just _one_ sentence to Axel, and the breath required for the speech slithered over Axel's exposed collarbone, sunk its teeth into the surmise that gooseflesh existed along his ivory neck, for some reason at _that_ point—just a centimeter into the dip of his clavicle. The man left, a sulfuric stench trailing in his wake. Axel placed three starchy dollar bills in his till.

“Axel,” _Axel, look at me, please._

“Yes?”

“Are you back now? That guy’s gone,” he waved a hand in front of his eyes, eclipsing the fluorescent light. “Come on. Get out of your place.”

His jaw tightened, a knot in tweed. “I can’t.”

A lost idol, Roxas sighed as if exhausted from sleeping upon a lotus. His eyes slid across the counter and landed on his eggshell shirt. He ignited.

“I’ll make you.” Then there was a fistful of his ruby hair in Roxas's lithospheric fist. Axel's body lurched forward, back arched as if he were being fucked. Roxas tightened his grip. He embraced his grievances. Axel dispelled his. For some reason, a flashing memory of _Hosanna’s Bagels,_ off Briles and 75th Drive, flew into Roxas' mind: moist cream cheese was pasted to his pink lips as he spotted a blue-haired girl across the way, buying an obviously toyish leather cuff in the fog. _Samidha,_ he recognized her. He massaged Axel’s scalp.

“That fucking hurts, you imp,” Axel snarled, “you _fucking_ imp.” Axel grabbed dug his nails into Roxas' wrist. Like a serrated knife, his nails tore uneven gashes into the smooth skin. Green eyes deadpanning, a black coal in the hearth, he sighed like a jumping ember falling to its cold and ashen death.

“I fucking _know_ ,” Roxas licked the back of his teeth, hip flexors tense. “I just…”  He released Axel's hair and watched the strands retract into Axel's sull. It wouldn’t be this day. _When, then?_

“You really are a stupid motherfucker, you know that?” Axel’s words, he thought, did not seem to inflict the grief they once did. Or perhaps they inflicted more. (At once he fought with his lips and eyebrows to prevent them from slinking downward.)

“It’s dusk, Axel.”

“I know.”

“Does it scare you?”

“Dusk?”

“… No, daylight.”

Gold escaped the green from his eyes like the pastures sprawled out across the Persian deserts, which once prided themselves on being Joseph’s delirious paradise. eah.”

"Yeah.”

“You’ll have to wait for daylight, Axel.” _When?_

“You keep saying the same thing, and so do I.  _I know._ ”

Roxas contested with his unusually long yellow bangs to check the time. “It’s dusk. I have to go. I’ll come back again next week, same time.”

“Yeah. That’ll be fine.”

“Okay. I will think of you.” Roxas chimed, his berry-colored apple cheeks squishing his eyes—he’s a stupidly romantic lovechild of English Graduate School and narcissism. His hair was the color of sunlight.

 _You and I, you and I, let us go then, you and I, walk then, stroll then, laugh then, fuck then; let us go then, you and I, etherized, plastered, fainted, dead_ —the little bell tinkled as Roxas pulled open the glass door to leave, Axel’s most preferred musical jingle for weeks. There was that idol in the twilight. _When, then?_

 

-0-

 

_Through the fence, over the flowering purple bushes and bee-lined trees, I could see him pushing. Pushing down, pushing up, breath hard, eyes sweating—I never intended for it to occur, you realize. It simply just did. Breath hard again (panting) and he only had two more sets—droplets splashed in those perfect golden ratios upon the silver concrete—a Nautilus, perhaps?—and I quivered. His perfect body glistened with his perfect salty sweat, his muscles flexed evenly and healthily, his ass cheeks squeezed together every time his chin touched the concrete—and sometimes he grunted, and it went straight to my balls. I lost my appetite. Hi. I'm Roxas. And I'm working on my dissertation._

_I published an article about his. I did. It was called “Plot Algorithms and Lyrical Flow from Defoe to Faulkner.” It was the pinnacle of my academic bullshit. It was a disguise. It wasn’t an article. Or perhaps it was. More of a prolonged article, chock full of academic bullshit and polysyllabic French diction and tons of alliteration. To piss off the academy, you know. They hate alliteration with alacrity and point it out in ironic assonances. I wrote about his sweating eyes and sinewy arms and gooselike neck and slippery tongue and tweed-looking hair:_

 

_“A snippet—as an entire portion would render this obsolete for its maximized_

_size versus this limited space of metrical inquiry—is what I derive from Defoe_

_as relevant. Conscientiously, perhaps with besmirched ideologies, Defoe tramples_

_l'Academie assertion that the individual must present prose in a plentitude of_

_polysyllabic postures. For Defoe, Moll Flanders is both the criminal of English_

_living, but also of 18_ _th_ _Century Canonical Prose. A harlequin, a bamboozle,_

_and swinger of sexual respects, Moll Flanders must traverse two continents to_

_construct her “self” as a sexually autonomous entity. A woman of great forti-_

_tude, she flexed impressively and worked for her sexual masculinity. Recall_

_Lady Ashley from Hemingway, as Modernism, and by extension, Faulkner,_

_tenderizes as a means of sexual exploration (centuries after Defoe, it should be noted). This continuity_

_of authorship in: 1) themes and 2) sexuality, expounds upon the human fascination_

_with the libidinal—perhaps the intestinal—process. It is a fixation. To bring this common-_

_ality of virginal obsession to the American continent, in realness, we must consider_ _Faulkner: a man of the Deep South, the idea of sex and virginity slumped slammed_

_South, the idea of sex and virginity slumped slammed_

_crashing crashing God dammit. I need to write. But, FUCK—one more time, then I’ll write._

_Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me; let me fuck you my heart. (Fucking hours pass and it’s_

_still just a balmy room with stained gray carpet and a blonde boy’s semen splurged_

_on linen paper notes that read, ‘Introduction to Triangulation in Literature.’) I_

_want you I want you I want you more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life_

_and I want your hair in my fingers and I want to talk about monotonous English_

_writers with you while unbelting your presumably-black jeans and I want to see if_

_you wear Ralph Lauren or J. Crew or Anthropologie underwear or any at all I_

_could be into that if you’re clean you know (now I know better: you wear one thread_

_of humanity), you better_ _k_ _now; I study a lot and I_ _fuck up a lot but this paper creates_ _a nice image_

_of myself even_ _if false and my college_ _degree looks pretty good mounted on my wall—mounted_

_right where the sunlight_ _slices into my office, the northeast wall, so that my peers will know_

_that I went to_ _an ultra-prestigious college—but it’s like, when I wake up to a beautiful view_

_and can identify all of the greenery growing outside my cold glass windows, my stomach_

_drops and I know that I_ _am missing one thing just one thing and it’s it’s—”_  


  1. _My problem is my limited vocabulary. Your hands did not come from a pelvis. Your eyes did not start in semen._
  2. _Walk then, stroll then, laugh then, fuck then._



_2.i. Sometimes allthetimes I find myself following him to the gym so I can watch him_ _push the angry world away from his chest._

  1. _You came from the egg because a mother is the beginning… And the end._



 -0-

-0-

 

“A Klondike Bar—now, please.”

Axel’s eye twitched. He blew out of his nose. Damn, this kid sucked at manners. “You want me to get you a Klondike Bar.” A question phrased as a statement. Steady, even breaths.

“Unless I’m speaking a foreign language, yeah, get me a fucking Klondike Bar.”

Grumbling, ambling, endearingly: “You maimed asshole. _Imp_ ,” he called out casually. He really was terrible at being polite.

Axel walked over to where Roxas stood, in front of the giant freezer, hopped onto the lower refrigerator racks, and extended his arm, elbow snapping, and felt with his hand in the cool white air what bars were not broken. His ivory fingers smoothed over the shiny silver of a wrapper, all-smooth and no cuts, he found, and gently lifted the icy mound, returning its coldness, acting as Lavoisier’s calorimeter. Axel’s scraped hands—bandaged, though—easily met Roxas's, and Roxas’s met Axel’s with that magnetic happiness running throughout his body, bursting forth in alternating flavors of mint and smooth, sweet coco.

“Th-thank you.” Roxas reached to touch Axel's ruby hair, a glowing gold hand dancing beside a flame, and gently stroked the strands. A violin—or was it a viola?—became. Roxas idolized him. The wet-looking hair slipped through his fingers—shining, like an exploding buoy on a dripping, violet horizon, the water beneath it lit up like explosions in the sky—and Roxas, for the first time, saw dusk in Axel's eyes.

 

-0-

 

_Because I’m a nice son of a bitch, a productive piece of shit, I translated my honors paper into its underlying message: I want Axel, all of him. Some people talk in metaphors and make it a point to talk in especially long conceits without having anything real to say, and I hate them for that. When I was studying back at school—and by school, I mean college—mulling over bullshit papers and working sixteen-hour days, I was one of ‘em. Some people are afraid of it all—never can go piss alone or pick out clothes alone or write out a tip without asking their acquaintance if fifteen percent is socially acceptable (which it never is: do twenty)—and Axel never was, not ever imprisoned by his own doing. My own Moll Flanders, Axel does what he wants; what he wants is goodness, but his own life doesn’t reflect that, just like mine doesn’t reflect that I’m actually a lazy, misanthropic, ugly piece of shit who has severe abandonment issues and can’t feel anything for someone without vomiting. Or, someone who does get over the vomiting and instead opts for low-pitched gurglings caused by self-deprecation. I can’t—not without losing appetite, without wanting to lose my food to the depths. I want to be swallowed. Some people actually say they love things or each other, but I can’t. I can’t speak, I can’t touch. I just think and write stories and eat oily pastries from gas stations and buy new pens and give them to people, and Axel does miniscule and disgusting and heart-wrenching things so you know the lyric sentiment is there, flowering and abundant—clear, lachrymose, following with dead certainty like the cry of a gull over a shimmering purple sea, like whistling three-beat songs in between pumps at the gas station, or cleaning truck windows for free, or touching my cheeks, or offering to fix my broken screen door, or risking an unattended till to pull ice cream down from seven-foot shelves for five-foot-ten dwarves._

 

_-0-_

 

Well, here I go: never once did I think I would be stuck in this gritty labyrinth, this vanilla-stained tile box that refuses to let my thoughts ever stop from swirling in this god damn ocean of processed food, of noisy wrappers, blacking out—it blackens, and I blacken, too, like an ad hominem in a line of syllogistic prose. There is a changeling, looking at me _seeing through me_ spurning my fragile mind—and, and when the bells ring above, my, my head is flooded—fuck, my being is slammed with the unshakeable notion: _you belong here._

I do not want to belong here; I do not want to belong here. I cannot belong here because I am utterly suffocated, and there is too much unnecessary thought involved in this. Why waste a mind In reconciling orders; in sweeping at 3am under this dingy FoodMart Moonlight; in wasting my life? If I wanted to really stop living, then I would just step out in front of the silver diesels that drive past and sing a song—I wouldn’t eat rotisserie-style hotdogs (or, as Roxas puts it, “pig anus and sweatshop workers’ abscess!”) and read Maxim Letters during the dead hours and mournfully wish to suck off blonde guys who wear still Rock & Republic jeans, pockets bulging with small leather books and douchey Montblanc pens. Such a sell-out.

“Why is your hand shaking?”

I look at my hand. “I didn’t realize it was.” _That’s weird._

“Well, it is,” the woman examines me as if I’m a suspect. “Shit, what are you on?” She asks in a bored tone. She makes no movement. To satisfy her insecure pang of institutionally-derived power, I eye her baton. The taser. The pistol. No pencils, no notebooks? A shame. I wonder briefly if she wears a body camera. (Probably not. Or, if she does, it’s off--why else accost some guy in the gas station? You got some rage in there, you cunt?)

“The only thing in my system is caffeine, so yes, I’m currently experiencing a dopamine rush, and my mind is psychoactive, just  _aflame,"_ I spat out.

Officer Cunt leered at me. “So you’re saying I’m buying drugs from you, is that it?” She motions to her steaming ounce of coffee. Twenty-four ounces of FDA-regarded drug.

“Slow down there, Miss Insecure Security Officer,” I instinctively straighten up and back away from the counter. “I just answered your question. You can have the coffee for free,” I had to throw in that last bit. I don’t necessarily feel like getting falsely arrested on grounds of me accusing an officer of ingesting drugs, then listening to the media and officer shout abnegations of me “resisting arrest.” My ass.

As expected, she found God’s good grace at the mention of _free._ “Alright,” her spindly fingers wrap possessively around the paper cup. I have been pushing for Styrofoam cups for the sake of heat preservation (calorimetry and all that), but my requests keep getting denied in lieu of the ozone hole above Antarctica. 

“So,” I avert my eyes. “Is this all you want--no gas or anything?” The officer annoyingly shook her head. Poisonous fingers slithered across my own and dropped the green into my palm, anyway. Clammy hands, I noted; sweaty, all too sweaty. “What’s this?”

“It’s just two dollars,” she mumbled, “I can pay that.” She reeked. I looked at her teeth, and there they stood like accidental stars lined up for squad drill—a sycophant to institutionalization; in an instant I lurched forward and fell into the caverns of her hollow throat: ashy soot clung to his tonsils and his larynx defied any muscular virility by hanging dumbly and swallowing me without tactile thought. her whole life disguised as a sham, I saw. Involuntary.

“Can I fucking help you, fire crotch?” Officer Cunt admonished.

“No, but I can help you.” I smile. “Those things will kill you,” I say.

She looked up at me. “Say that again?”

And it tumbled forth: “Your throat is contaminated with black soot; you have a fireplace, and you seem to inhale excessively around said fireplace—why you would still have a non-electric fireplace escapes me—because your tonsils are atrocious; and, on top of all of this, you smoke. Yellowed teeth, dry fingertips, an absence of kinetic energy, that god-awful stale stench: you are a smoker, and a soot breather, and you seem to think wearing that uniform immortalizes you because that pathetic material apparently defends against one’s self-injury,” I unhooked my dead eyes from Officer Cunt’s own, snapping out of my fixation. I smile. “Let me tell you; knives can pierce your vest, so be careful around crazy motherfuckers like me… And smoking will kill you.”

She punched me. Who’s her god now, I ask as I pinch my nose and voraciously flip through Maxim’s favorite hour.

 

-0-

 

And off in the distance, spiraling through the dark night, a tired truck driver furiously shouted out obscenities to an innocent-looking road dweller. Something about trickery, or was it infidelity? Whatever it was, the road dweller relentlessly yelled casual offerings of his body for a quick three-mile ride, or to the next gas station—and the driver only smashed his brakes, the brakes of his eighteen-wheeled diesel, in the dead of the night and under the glowing stars, when Sora pulled down his dirty mandarin jumpsuit and slapped his fleshy balls around in his hand.

“Get the fuck in the truck, you heathen,” Riku admonished, “criminal.” _Creature._ The driver possessed a certain _je ne sais quoi_ about his voice—perhaps it was the slight titillating in his jeweled, throaty tone—that appealed directly to the road dweller’s groin. Riku steered with one hand, truck penetrating the night at ninety-five mph, and furiously ran his hand up-and-down Sora's cock--

_"let’s go”—_

with only the night as the carrier of unbelievably heavy, obsidian, atmospheric pressure.—

_what did he say?—_

Riku, ignoring Sora's mutterings, leaned over and spit a bubbly wad of goo and Trident-scented saliva on Sora’s dick. Sora called out for another landmass, a new shore. For open skies and ocean spray. For grass. For hula skirts and loincloths tied with tweed. He called out for earth; he fluttered his eyes in a haze, a pale blue dot behind fleshy blinds.

 

-0-

 

Occasionally, Roxas would stampede into Axel’s grotto (read: FoodMart at 3am), a sunny smile plastered to his bronze face, Oreo remains stuck in his teeth from a nervous night spent annotating Milton, hand carrying a glorified, mysterious brown paper bag. Occasionally, Axel would rocket into the air as a means of showing fright, would sometimes launch his pages of porn at Roxas’ face, or carry on mopping the tiled prison with his splintering mop, a sucker fish cleaning the bottom of the sea.

Sometimes, it was about loving someone and desiring sex, or sometimes it was about loving to fuck someone and hating the sex afterward. It was always the thought: _love is chemicals._

Occasionally, Roxas would run inside, excitedly spin around to lock the double doors, flip off the security camera (“Roxas, you really aren’t proving anything by that. This is _my_ place.”), and sprawl out on the floor, spread-eagle, and shove cookies into his mouth while Axel stood from his impressive six-foot-one stature and messily spilled vitamin D milk into Roxas’ mouth, eyes teary and laughing. Roxas would drop two fifties on the counter to make up for the nonexistent lost purchases between 3-4am; it somehow quelled the gurgling in his belly. Before the spilling of milk, before the acquaintanceship between bone and ceramic, before the creamy mess, Axel had removed Roxas’ quintessential Depressed English Student sweater—“I can’t get this milk shit all over your clothes, Roxas. Fellowships aren’t meant for shopping at Banana Republic!”—a brick-red cashmere sweater clung to his shoulders until Axel managed to pull it over his big head; “Sweaters Soften, They Insulate, Roxas;” languidly, his ivory hands smoothed over his hips for a floating moment—breath still—and he noted his stiffness, and lifted up, then. In a hot exhalation of breath, balmy, Axel ignited: felt the tiny surge of _sex_ on the tip of his pubic bone, felt like tumbling into Roxas with legs jellified and skin tingling, surging with it _._ Roxas, locked and intense, stared at him eyes sparkling, analyzing the geometry of Axel's face: two ovals with concentric golden circles, rectangular eyelashes, a trapezoidal forehead, upside-down triangle for a chin, perhaps hexagonal cheeks; sometimes he imagined rhombi under those elegiac eyes like ice, like stillness. But then Axel lifted Roxas' sunset-colored sweater, blinding him, a matador, and extinguished both the movements of tubes and rings.

After the eighth spill of milk on his forehead, Roxas sat up. “Why is your face red?”

Axel sheepishly looked to the aisles. “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

“Uh, I will worry about it,” he challenged. “Tell me.”

“Haha—no.” he smirked.

“No—you need to. Please tell me.”

he felt bad. “Ah, well, you know,” he shrugged, “sometimes my mouth gets the best of me. And a day ago was one of those times.”

“No,” Roxas shook his head. “You can’t let that happen. What did you do?” _Axel, what did you fucking do?_ Yesterday was Axel's all-over body day at the gym; how could he have gotten into trouble?

“Nothing, if you ask me,” he laughed. “Just pointed out the obvious.”

“Which was?”

“I just told a lady officer that bulletproof vests don’t shield from cancer. Not a big deal, Roxas.” He shrugged. His velvet hair was pinned up today, harshly side-swept and hanged like the tail of a horse.

 _Fuck. "_ And that somehow explains your black eye?”

“Uh, no,” he flicked his gaze to the carton in his hand, taking a giant slurping swig in his mind, poured cream sliding down his blueberry throat. “She just backhanded me. I don’t know,” Axel decided to take a drink, pink tongue on white cream, “insulted by my comment, I suppose.”

“You suppose,” Roxas echoed. He didn’t know whether to write or ask Axel if he could blow him. He wanted to feel his cloying skin against his lips, wanted his body to tremble under his tongue. For too long Axel had accepted a life upon which, titillating between the edges of mesas and air, the cyclic notions of grout, only grout, and pain, gnashed their teeth in envy as it peered through the glass a romantic city complete with fog in the morning and slicing summer light in the evening. It stood, therefore, as a pillar of salt, to let him throw his head back into the grassy breezes (or oak headboard) and be imbued with the warm, amber air (or waves of undulating pleasure). “You realize that saying shit like that alienates people, right?” A slow breath, “your little tricks—“

“—they aren’t tricks.” Axel gave him a steely look. “They aren’t tricks.”

 _What do I say? What the fuck do I say?_ “Okay. So, your pseudo-observations, then,”

“ _Then?_ Are you fucking compensating me? Do you think I’m mentally stunted, Roxas?” At this point, he seethed.

“Uh,” _No. Absolutely not. I’m the one. It’s me, never you. “_ I don’t know how to answer that.” _You fucking dick. You fuck up._

Axel, uncool clerk enthusiast who gallantly strummed the notion that degrees were “intellectual cacophony,” dropped the gallon, plastic cracking against the tile, and walked toward the glass doors. A yellow fog pressed against the glass, a weak stream of pale Cracker Barrel light danced amongst the water, and he imagined a silver-headed ghost hurling its body into his store, not a glass box but titillating, standing moonlight crumbling under the silvery dune.

“I’m not stupid, Roxas,”

His throat constricted. He saw the transformation. _I know you’re not stupid._ And beyond the projection, Roxas couldn’t stop touching Axel in his mind. (He hums, Roxas noted, looking up from in between his legs.)

 

-0-

 

Tuesday, August 29, 2:02 p.m.

“Roxas—how’s your writing going?”

“Not well.”

 

Tuesday, September 5, 6:10 p.m.

“Hey, Axel!” He pushes open the door. He says hello over the head of a silver-haired customer.

 

Thursday, September 7, 8:00 p.m.

Roxas walks from Cracker Barrel. Inviolable light shatters stares. In his hand is wrapped a teardrop-shaped glass bottle: golden-flaked maple syrup that falls in sugary streams and sticks to faces. His eyes are the size of the moon. _I can’t do this right now. Fuck Moll Flanders. Fuck Aphra Ben. Fuck Stevenson. Other people do it though—like Samidha. She can do it. Writes every single fucking day. Writes a chapter a month. Hikes. Kayaks, even—so why the fuck can’t I just write?_

He is off the tickling turquoise grass now, and faces Axel’s place. FoodMart-slash-Flying J’s gas station. _Samidha does things. Things move with her. She knows exactly what to do and how to do it. I hate this. I hate that I can’t fucking move. I’m paralyzed. I cannot move, so why can she?_

“Roxas?” Axel calls out to him, a glowing throat. Inviolable light shatters his stare. His light did not come from a pelvis; it couldn’t have, not with his red infinities.

Roxas' words are slow at first. “Hey, Axel.” He just wants toherey hise all night and look up at the gas pumps from Flying J’s hill. “What—what are you doing?”

He’s pissed off, judging from his narrowed eyes, recalling their last conversation. “Taking out some trash. Deductive reasoning, much?” Axel tosses the bag on the concrete, tiringly invites him to sit next to his on the porous concrete. He sits. “Why are you out here, anyway?”

“I wanted some pancakes,” he points to the flickering yellow lights across the busy street.

“Pancakes are good. I like waffles more,” he exhales gasoline.

“You wanna get some?” he perks up. The bottle sits in his hand, still. “We can go.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t go.” A lone drosophila buzzes into the glass doors. The overhead vacuum whirs sinisterly.

“Why?”

Axel twists his face, turns his head away from him. “I’m waiting.”

“Ah,” he knows the answer. He looks down, somewhat sad. “Oh, I have something for you,”

“What is it?” If he were an idol, his wings would be extending, flexing, and a ripple-then-explosion of feathers and wax scales would pop along his spine, elbows, hands. His neck would elongate and glisten under the accumulation of sweat from years of working without quench. A twenty-four hour store, the constant visiting of diesels; a Claremont-student-turned-dropout who wanted to live atop the geometric lines that he read so angrily, caustically, in latitudes and longitudes. He gave Axel the bottle that once held liquid gold.

“It was just pretty, and I like how it fits in your hand, and plus you haven’t been to the restaurant in so long…” He trailed off. _Is this even a good idea?_ “I don’t know,” he shrugs, unapologetic. “I just wanted to give it to you.”

Axel’s teeth light up like white stars waiting in line for the universe to rip them apart and hurl back into the gaping and empty perpetuity.

“Thanks.” He smiles and smells the bottle. Imagining a vile, he brings the glass to his lips and puts the tip in his mouth.

 

 -0-

 

Thursday, September 15, 8:00 p.m.

“Why the fuck do you charge so much for gas?”

“Well, the price isn’t up to me,”

“I didn’t fucking ask that,” Riku states plainly.  _Too calm._

“You’re funny,” Axel throws Riku's purchase at his chest—three plastic squares, a giant wooden horse slapped across. “I’m the only gas station for the next fifty miles. I _gotta_ make some cash,” he gestures lewdly to his hips, “Monopolizing and all that, you know.”

Riku, defender of the doors, snickers. “Okay. I see your game,” a seedy grin crawls on his face, and he gestures toward the doors. “My monopoly is outside.” He slinks to the exit, and as he stands there, between the threshold of what both beckons and eschews Axel, he smiles. He sees the gel, how it glues Axel to the food-lined white cage; he sees an empty map. Because in this life, the aboriginal kings find death by lights, by illumination, by electrical currents; gone are the days of hand-built boardwalks, where brown sea eagles spiral to accidental death, death by powder and scalding rage. _To Sora,_ he memorizes, _To Sora,_ and nowhere else. To the turquoise coasts and aquamarine-colored fish, to breathing crimson rocks and the land where scaled beasts determine who lives and who dissipates. A vista of criminals. An island of the aborigines. The Opera House. _To Sora, and I…_ Axel watches him leave like he’s a ghost, a gallant and golden beatification against the sordid fog. he wonders when Riku stopped being so ugly.

 

-0-

 

Wednesday, September 25, 1:30 a.m.

 _Let us go then walk then stroll then laugh fuck—_ “Axel!” Roxas pushes the glass door open.

 

October sometime, 2 a.m.

His bronze arms oh those golden limbs rotate and hit glass.

“Roxas,” his face is red. _Fuck._ “Roxas, uh, can you come back later?”

“Why?” He looks more closely and takes inventory: reddened face but no alcohol in sight, tense, hunched over, breathing heavily. He sees some hair peeking out from the bottom of the counter. Nighttime scrapes you like the spikes of passion fruit.

 

Friday, October 14, 2:00 a.m.

 _“You know what it feels like losing home—why can’t we see it for others?”_ Roxas scrolls past his Twitter feed, and spots the wreckage:

It is a human standing atop rubble dichotomized by a Koala lying dead atop a desiccated Eucalyptus. He stops scrolling. He stops. Is this where it will occur? Right hise, in his fucking vehicle, will he break? (When you are Roxas, and all you want to do is eat syrupy meals over hotcakes with the greatest human being you know will exist, the answer is always _yes.)_ Out of him pour the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Icarian Sea. His eyes drop forever to the heraclean tomb, and he wants to die.

How do you live in this world? You can’t win, cannot act—we are drugged, we are asleep, we cannot awaken our souls because we are taught to ignore our demons instead of allow their ambition to ignite our souls. We romanticize the bucolic notion of an ultra-modern Dream, but Roxas knows, he fucking _knows_ , that we cannot win; we can choose to work our entire eighty-three-year-long existence toiling away at a cubicle inside of a grey prison that reads “For the Better Good: Save the Poor!” and die, having done absolutely fucking _nothing_ , or we can learn to live with the insoluble fact that we are meaningless, that humanity has destroyed humanity. His eyes are the size of the moon, he’s lulling Earth’s gravity, he’s bending the seas and cracking the iron at the core; he’s falling apart, one fleshy string at a time, in this mango-shaped space. His bones stand on othis mammals’ bones—and he knows that the Kings are dead. A wrinkle in time, where the fuck _is_ it; he wants to ward off the dust-sized darkness, but he _knows_ , and suddenly, the worst crime against humanity isn’t murder but fooling millions into believing the future mantra that good prevails, because _monsters reside in those who sit in thrones._ Where’s your Mephistopheles, he wants to know, _we are fools for thinking that we can do anything we’re etherized we sleep in half-forgotten streets and one-night cheap motels sawdust and oyster shells—_

 

Saturday, October 22, 6 p.m.

His freakishly huge eyes soared above the hundreds of fellow protesters, clad in orange and red. Summertime in the vista was sweet like the burn of pineapple juice. After the toil, Sora realized that in order to see the skies, he had to incinerate. Pollute. Harm. Destroy. Which would explain the incessant _burn_ to fling, streak, and throw bucketfuls, of lamb’s blood on Sister Angelica’s abbey. And it was a gruesome scene: porous white pillars oozing the blood. Tasted like soil, maybe, tangy like a grapefruit. Streaking and uneven, the black liquid seemed to ferment under the dense summer air; it stared at you, jogged down the ingenious architecture of the abbey, as it, the royal lamb, should. Chaotic and wide-eyed and hopping high with cocaine pulsing throughout his veins, Sora screeched in a fit of _Kokoro-_ inspired mania, a sound and fury that only villagers pillaged by the iron tube in the Japanese countryside could know, recognize. Foolhardy, maybe—decimated. An ugly screech, sonorous, marked the scene as _criminal._ Deviant behavior, possession of drugs, disturbing the peace, defamation and vilification and vandalism of a Holy Place—because the institution can set precedents on female treatment in Bullshit Society Post-2000s yet the skies and Sirens remain unhealed on grounds of ultra-intervention. The metal cuffs around his wrists seemed familiar and new, as if they hadn’t sliced him five times before. The angry officer slammed Sora into the car window, sharp nails grating his skull. A mumble, “don’t fuckin’ know why you do this.” Sora contemplates. He is a two-hour jog, perhaps ninety-minute run, away from that dingy Cracker Barrel that Riku takes him to. Surely, it will house him. Surely. It’s not until the officer opens the backdoor and gets nailed in the head with a bucket—Sora will have to thank Kai later—that he runs, shirt ripped and hands behind his back, cocaine and adrenaline his only fuel for the ridiculous escape.

 

-0-

 

Some night, tens of months later, Riku crashed his diesel on the side of the road because he couldn’t stop mourning the passing of his favorite grocery clerk. On a night, he went placidly amidst the haste, didn’t bother to look both ways, and forgot what peace there was in silence. Somebody found him—someone, absolutely—there were tiny snowflake-shaped Oreo crumbs on Riku's pomegranate lips.

 

-0-

 

Roxas wandered into the FoodMart at a perfectly reasonable time. Axel wondered if something was horribly wrong. And a touch of light made the difference, this time, because when Roxas asked him to run away to the Cracker Barrel, Axel complied. No talk of daylight.

 

-0-

 

And it continued like this for quite a while. After a while, Axel finally relented and hired somebody to work the nightshift. With much trepidation and wholly unnecessary fingerprinting, drug testing, blood testing, even (“How the fuck are your sugar levels so low?” “Dunno—sweet ‘n low, maybe.” “Sora, that’s not—whatever.”), he hired a twitchy fellow named Sora, partially because he liked his skin, but more so because he remembered seeing him pull his way across his parking lot years ago. His limp little body, slimed with blood and crusty, too crusty, had been lain by the hand of god onto the spiky asphalt. The beanie-wearing mothisfucker had even some paint droplets in his hair, he remembered. At three in the A.M., Axel knew better than to leave his till and go help the boy, but he did the best he could: like an ancient idol, his body positioned under the threshold of the door, he strongly called out to the then-stranger-Sora. He noticed he had but only a beanie and cargo shorts. After convulsing under the gas pumps, with Flying J’s Hill as the backdrop, Sora sashayed over to Axel and promptly vomited into his hair.

Axel wiped his eyes and grabbed Sora by the elbow, gingerly tossed him behind his counter, yelled at the blonde fuck customer who tried open the glass doors, and ran to the back of his store to get some First Aid supplies. When he returned (“fuck, don’t I have antiseptic?”), Sora drunkenly mumbled about the blonde fuck, asked who he was? But Axel didn’t remember, and Sora fell asleep at his feet. He snoozed as a cat purrs at their owners feet. In the meantime, however, he dabbed at his raw feet—like some curated meat—and thought of cheap, one-night motels. Axel gave him a makeshift sponge bath. A little while later, around 8 A.M., his water bottle fell from the counter and hit Sora square in the face, so there was  _that_ drunken tantrum to deal with.

Only around noon did Sora tell his his name, his cocaine addiction, and the rest he couldn’t quite make out. Tears fell onto blubbering lips and his eyes turned petrifyingly violet, and through the hole in that fence and amidst the noise, he did make out the phrase: “I have failed.”

 

-0-

 

Wind spiraled over the grassy hedges and through the giant concrete pillars at Flying J’s. It spun elegantly in alternating warmth and coldness as if the Earth were sending clusters of baby’s breath through the flowers and through the fence at FoodMart where Axel and Roxas were hitting. And somehow in this catastrophic, aerial burst, the yolk-like sun kept its watchful place, tucked in just beneath the horizon on this side of the planet. Apples lined the sky, lemon drops decorating the slanting rays; the guava spread its nectar in a cloying pink smear across the sky, while the blood-red pomegranate splashes fornicated with its neighbors, the royal lamb.

“ _You’re_ early.”

“Mmm, no, you’re just late.”

Axel rounded the table and sat beside Roxas. Roxas turned to face him, and then he heard a flutter, clap, of wings. Roxas turned and angled his chest toward his, an expectant and glowing smile aimed his way.

Axel closed his eyes and let a soft smile bloom on his face. “Today is two hundred and fifty-five.”

“Hm? What’s that about?”

His lips moving slowly, “it’s been that long since you got me to finally hire that kid. Damn.”

“Oh,” he gazed absentmindedly across the dining room, and spotted a half-filled French press, point towards Roxas and Axel, ignoring its dilapidated, white-haired rapists. “Sora. I can’t believe you’ve kept track.” He snorted. “You’ve memorized it since then, huh?”

 _Axel remembers toeing Roxas’ nose._ “Well… I just had to, Roxas. Something to hold…”

In an actually spot-on Londonderry accent, Roxas puffed up his face and bellowed, “ ‘Twas the nudiustertian after last, I _daresay_ , that I, _Miz Axel Lark Earnhardt,_ alas!—left my sodden shack and began a pilgrimage with BUG CATCHER Roxas to the, ahem, _cracker-barrel!”_ He erupted in laughter.

The glowing carotenes from his long strands crawled up to his skull and splayed themselves across his cheeks, his ears. Totally embarrassed yet oddly touched, Axel covered his face with his ivory hands. “Roxas,” he looked over at him. “Did you just reference Pokémon?”

“I sure fucking did.” They exchanged delighted smiles. In shedding himself of his sexual ambiguity, he wanted to kiss Roxas.

“How did you get here, Roxas?” Axel’s back cracked into place. He sat erect, eyes piercing his own with a galvanizing shock of emerald sputter. Still laughing and wiping his eyes, he blinked a few times and rested his head on the table, body still rattling.

“Ha, uh, I drove her!”

“Let’s go.”

“W-what?” Roxas shook his head. _Why?_ “Axel, we just got here, I’m hungry.” _This is weird._

Annoyed, Axel grunted. With the wood of the table shielding his hand, he smoothed his long fingers over Roxas’ expectedly warm knee. Roxas froze. His hand was fuck his _hand_ on his knee thank god I’ve been swimming more lately Jesus Christ _in a minute there is time_ , what is he fucking doing god the pancakes that’s it _that was it -_

“Bug Catcher. I want to fuck you.”

_O-okay._

 

-0-

 

“—I mean, it _was_ annoying having to help you shut down the whole store to just walk across the damn _street_ all the time, _,”_

“I can’t believe it’s been this long,”

“You were just cooped up in there, you know, and I,”

“That’s almost a damn year—don’t you remember? I was a fucking zombie,”

“Right—in the old days, you barely said anything to me—but hey! You still are a zombie,”

“Fucker.”

“—let’s face it: after a year of helping you mop and get all sweaty just to go get some pancakes, it was time for you to just ask for some damn _help_ and hire someone else for the night shifts _.”_

 _“_ I’m laughing now, haha, I’m _laughing_ , ‘cause it’s like I don’t always want to do something, Roxas. Do you understand? I don’t’ always want to go and do something. I’m happy that I finally stopped leeching the life out of you, and I’m so god damn _grateful_ that _I_ managed to hire a _not_ -train wreck for an employee, but _damn_ , sometimes I just liked to sit in that store. Like my little office, an empty corner surrounded by glass, you know? I don’t always feel the incessant need to go out and hike all of those fucking mountains and look for rams, hell, I don’t even feel the need to stand on my toes when I’m sitting in that wooden stool by the till!”

Axel snorted. A wild look in his eye, and then, “and fucking _Sora_ , too, his insane Shakespearean tirades! You ever hear him, Axel? He just goes _off_ for hours about some silver-haired driver, a demon is what I say, and I swear to god no one even knows what he’s talking about!”

Another, and again, “and it’s weird to think, you know, that before all of this construction, before all of the highways were here and before my shitty-ass life at my shitty-ass disgusting convenience store, before you decided to fuck books for your life’s work, and all the world was in chaos, this, too, was once a place of darkness.”

And after that, Roxas looks at him and says, “how can you look at the storm coming, yet not kneel?”

_Sitting on a pale blue dot, the crepuscular threads lace into reds and light up the darkness for the know-it-alls, for the assholes, the bitches, the clowns, the misbehaviors, the depressed cunts, the hollow skins, disappointments, fuckheads, problems, asswipes, miscreants, pieces of shit, firecrotches, lovers, writers, pessimists, students, baristas, cartographer, fugitives, explorers, and double agents—and the sun also penetrates him into an oblivious hotness, balmy, and grabs him by the shoulders and maniacally shouts: YOU FUCKING MATTER. It massages out the build-up of acid in his back from having to stand and resist the pain like the monstrous fucking tide, while tapping its fingers on countertops to prove to him that it is omnipresent, and that from bubbling iron came he. See without the eyes and darkness rests only in snakelike tributaries not the veins._

 

-0-

 

So what if I love you? So fucking what? I could die; you could kill me. So what? I love you—that means I am yours. A cough, _No_ . _People don’t own people_ . But I love you. You can have me. He cups his cheek, wants to kiss him. He says it again. He covers his mouth with his mouth, that little circle of darkness. He carries his heart inside of his. _Sweet soul, you have done more than you credit yourself for_. The ocean sucks the watery spray back to its belly and spreads itself across the flashing sand.

 

-0-

 

“Talk to me, bitch.” Sora rings up Riku’s order for turkey jerky, a liter of water, and Cheetos. “What’s been going on?”

To talk to him, bitch, was going to be something quite different. How different? Oh, how could he know; what was there, what was in a name—were humans presupposed, predestined, to find this knowledge within a pillar of salt. However one chooses to phrase this rendition, the salt—it erodes, it forms those bountiful cliffs over the English Channel, it seasons, and it preserves. How to tell one of this? How—is it a question of being hollow or stuffed, that we are one of the same, a tautological review? Is it that this world can feel my rage. To talk to him, bitch, consisted of a conversation of crusty Cheetos lips and chewed up Oreo remains lying scattered in his teeth, perhaps those histones (oh god those histones), and lots of half-forgotten turkey jerky bites, which had been laughed into the ice that sat on the countertop as he, the forgotten idol and guarder of doors, caressed the cool water.

A haggard Riku looks at Sora, uncaring, uncool. He wonders when Sora decided to start fucking himself.

 

-0-

 

It’s a white room.

Get me gloves, get me gel! (The gel and gloves the intern gets.)

Take off this shirt—don’t unbutton, please remove this immediately!

I unbutton it and already it’s a dud.

The electric shocks still surprise me every time I

Punch

Their chests. Do I need more gel? They barely

Heave,

And I am not quite sure how to handle this type still. You’d

Think

That after billions of years of cellular advancement,

Apoptosis

Would cease to be so

Penetrative. There are no eyes fluttering here.

(“You look at the storm coming, yet you don’t kneel; you see me coming, yet you don’t kneel. The flighty particles hit and smash and still _you don’t fucking kneel_ , you could have kneeled you absolute fuck, you could have jumped and avoided”)

Another shock,

It’s occurred. It’s over. I want to

Clock out.

I look to my resident and tell him, “I am clocking out.”

I clock out, and I look at my watch. It’s a cold stone, still,

Why is there blood on this watch?

There was no blood on that button.

I walk out after I clock out, and I exit through the gray-framed doors, and needles pierce my skin and slowly rip my neck apart, as I stand under that fucking doorway, and still, I don’t know how to work this electric shock. I stand there and suck away at the blood from my fingertips and am stabbed with a scalpel in the brunt of my neck. Bursting pain bursts from my spine, liquid running down and it feels like my entrails are exiting through my spine, that fucking liquid, and god knocks me forward like taking a bullet to the back, and my face is smashed into the concrete, my ears feed to its teeth, and there I lie, my cheek to the earth, while my back bleeds and I wonder why these gloves still latch onto my hands’ skin as if eight sizes too small.

-0-

 

Dear Roxas,

Oh, like a drone, I’m flying somewhere above your flagstone path now. I knew that one—him. He had that deep, achy groan inside of him, like someone kicked his in the belly all night, and he never even tried to slap them away. You knew him, too. He liked to hoard all of those silvery bars in the freezer, some sort of collector who couldn’t let go—I guess that would be considered a hoarder. Some melody along that line, you know how it goes. The funny part about those little bars, though, is that they never broke once. You’d think that chocolate would crack, but it didn’t. He had good hands, I guess. (But his secret to keeping those bars fresh and smooth and sugary inside was this: basic chemistry.)

There he went, you saw, waving his strong arms in the air, yelling a little bit. He looked like fool, though, with his olive skin against the silver horizon, and later, that silver metal. Could it have been helped? Maybe. But probably not, if you would like my sincere opinion. He had some unquelled evil inside of him, deep too, and he loved with such ardor that he would kill himself just to keep it alive. At least you knew his as I once did. I peer down from where I float now, and your sadness dulls my spirit. I try to sashay above you, sashay like you showed me when we’d spill old cream on the tile and sip at each other’s milk-sticky necks under the yellow cracker-barrel light, but then I remember falling in love with you, and I stop sashaying.

[Easter eggs and oyster shells line the garden that you showed me on the night that we fell down in your tulip bed. I looked in your eyes, and you looked right back at me, a downtrodden little elegy like a ribbon around your cornea, and for a moment I saw in your eyes hope like the green of that garden, but a part of me wonders if it was just the reflection of my eyes into yours.]

[April is the cruelest month and I have no patience for masking. I saw hostile architecture; briefly, I considered my eyes and your eyes, but I stopped. Are you a hollow man, I want to ask? You don’t kneel, yet you bring in those damn leather books. I see the cold of a child’s wrist, he’s cold, where is his jacket, then? Like shoes taking away the tough leather that should be on his feet, his heels hit the concrete right outside of my milkshake-giving store. Maybe he has the strength that I need. With my own eyes, I know that there is no shame: must I admit that it is I who failed, who has fucked up his life like Cain, who said no to the bear and yes to the vanilla-scented glass box. Here.]

[It is your influence that has spurned this golden thread from my heels, my skin, my hair; had someone asked me to empty water from a shoe, I would not have been able to if the directions were on the heel. Who were you thinking of when you were running into the dark?

This is how it ends.

This is the way the world ends,

The world ends,

Not with a bang.]

 

Dear Axel,

    It ends with a whimper.

 

-0-

 

As I sit across the green plastic table and look at his eyes,

The hollow of my throat constricts and I lean forward

And the warmth gets me lost in the tremors the ripples

Of his throat, and I imagine that I am swallowed up

By the cavernous throat in front of me;

he takes my body and truncates my mind from soul,

From a dialogue between the soul and body he

Transported me from this unbroken yet squeaking

Chest I have. Soul: is this good enough, body,

And my body says no, no, no—what is heavier,

Souls asks, the world or this box? The world or

This box? The world or this box?

I lurch forward and like a changeling I am snapped

Into his undulating throat and I look at his skin,

It’s like the imprint of waves and seafoam on the

Sand. He ripples out into the violet horizon,

And no buoys are out that far—captivating, he is,

The Roxas lamb trots down this hill and I am slammed back onto my green table.

It squeaks, and I am lost in his warm eyes, I look at his

And he looks at me,

And for a moment I wonder if he

Can see what I’ve been trying to write

For this—dear Axel—it ends with a whimper,

Axel. It ends with a whimper, not a bang,

And I’m sorry it can’t end with a bang.

I’m crawling from the bottom of his throat, I reach my hand up and

Latch

Onto his jaw, pull myself up out from his,

And he doesn’t care. He lets me rise from inside,

And I realize that he did not come from a pelvis;

No, these fingers did not arise from semen.

I sit across from him, smile at him, I ask him what

Two hundred and fifty-five means.

\--April may be the cruelest month, you see,

For it reminds us now of taxes and paperwork,

Of governmental identities taking money and

Failed crops, starvation, the start of blazing heat…

But with that: open skies, warmth of sand, warmth of hands,

Work and days of hands, icy water atop scorching vistas,

Pumping hearts and dust from his veins,

Porcelain cheeks. Infinity scarves made from stringy wood.

In a minute, I say, this is the time—do I dare disturb the universe?

I listen to his answer, and in that singular moment,

My dissertation falls apart; I fall apart, and

The world crunches my bones in its jowls,

But in this I see Carton, I see his,

Recalled to life.

Handsome colored men and women, making money,

I want to tell him—for fourteen years, there was a lonely blonde

Kid sitting by himself; for ten more, this same kid

Jacked off to Milton and carried stupid books to

Bolster his self-esteem; for seven of those years,

He wondered who should touch the small of his back,

He was limp in an effort to dismiss his void, right,

He began to imagine how old he would be had his heart not taken

So much of his life out of him.

He wondered, and he didn’t know how to go across this.

But in his answer, and in his contemplation of that silver

Dune, that boy with paint in his hair,

He knew.

He felt a bullet hit the back of his head, and he felt like he might even

Choke, burst into tears, maybe.

I look at you, and I sink to the ground.

I’m suddenly reminded of that drawing on my

Mom’s refrigerator—a brown house with a giant

Splash shaped like a teardrop on the top of it,

And the simple decoration of a silver kettle seen

From the four-quadrant window.

he tells me what this number means,

I see his smile, I see his bulging hand,

My body is ripped apart and I feel scales smash into my spine:

If I’ve got anything I love at all, or if he does too, then do it.

He sees me see it, we both know—some catcher, we say,

Some catcher we say; maybe we want to stomp somebody

Together; but we shouldn’t stop on anybody but

Each other. I sharpen it, he loads. We look at each other,

The gel is too thick, we note.

It is too thick.

We never spoke.

“Oh, shit,” we hear. “I’m clocking out.”

She clocks out.

Struck by the lightness of being,

It happens and god pulls our souls from our limp little

Bodies like a fisherman yanks a trout from the surface

Of the blue-green water after he has pulled them up;

God grabs his green cloth to hold the slippery beast,

It gently whimpers as he pulls the four-pronged hook

From its pale tongue; it emerges, it dies,

It mimics like a parrot what it saw underneath:

‘the water’s gone cold, ash buried at the top,

water’s gone cold,’ and the parrot murmurs,

sputters, what it once heard from a flautist

using melody to kill _I love you_ and does it

strike the tower and take my breath.

I grab his hand and pull with me his body

to the depths.

 

-0-

 

I could never forget your face. I see your marble features, and I realize that, no, not even in madness, death, sickness, could I forget it. Briefly, I wonder how you feel about mine: is it beautiful enough, chiseled enough, creamy enough, wonderful enough, for you? I cannot make any promises to you. I cannot say that, with me, you will achieve your dreams - I do not even know if I will achieve my own. In fact, me being with you might end up stymying your dreams - are you ready to take this chance with me?

 

The afternoons pass slowly. Yellow sunlight drapes this town in some sort of eternal summer. People… They walk slowly. Or perhaps they appear to walk slowly because decades mean nothing to me anymore, not here. The trains whiz past me, and the ice cream is not quite as sweet. Your convenience store is being bulldozed in eight days. People say it is cursed; perhaps we are cursed together. I am glad to be dead. Sea breezes are common here. The gulls refuse to line the border of sand and city. Nighttime darkness is only blackness like this; it no longer holds mystery, for I have seen and lived in this darkness for years, and years, and years. Sometimes, I receive visitors. I miss you.

 

-0-

 

_You and I, you and I, let us go then, you and I, walk then, stroll then, laugh then, fuck then; let us go then, you and I, etherized, plastered, fainted, dead._

_You and I, you and I, let us go then, you and I, walk then, stroll then, laugh then, fuck then; let us go then, you and I, etherized, plastered, fainted, dead._

_You and I, you and I, let us go then, you and I, walk then, stroll then, laugh then, fuck then; let us go then, you and I, etherized, plastered, fainted, dead._


End file.
